Genomic Repairman said:

If I do a western blot to look at protein levels of something else, I'm always going to check my knockdown.  Every time.  I mean that is what good rigorous science is.

But this isn't what good, rigorous reading comprehension is. If I write again that these experiments (in my scenario) were performed side by side, as in AT THE SAME TIME, will you finally get it? Otherwise, I give up. I really don't know how else to state this.

Jade Ed, they report the siRNA knockdown in the same cell line as before, but don't make mention to it being a previous sample.  Also they do not fully describe or reference the antibody used in the paper (which to me is a big no no but the journal let them slide on that).  The siRNA sequences are referenced to the old paper.  The description of the work is pretty vague so I can't tell if its from the old batch of cells or its a new batch.  Either way if I'm saying that if I knockdown the amount of this protein and it affects modification of this protein.  I'm not only going to run the western for the protein modification but for the knockdown as well too rather than relying on a two year old film.

We can debate this rubbish until the cows come home, but its still reuse of a figure, which I was fairly certain is frowned upon by journals.  Is it out and out fabrication of data?  No.  But I don't agree with doing it.  Reference back to the old work and give credit to the authors and journal that the original work is published in.

GR- it sounds like the reviewers just let this paper through without reviewing the paper. 

I review many papers where my company's products are used and I see this all the time. I've seen papers with experiments with no controls, figures labeled wrong, and conclusions made on "data not shown".

In one of these situations, I looked at where the authors were from, and then looked at the editorial board and saw that a member of the board and the authors both were from the same small liberal arts college.  I contacted the editor-in-chief about the paper and his response was "peer review works a lot better than you think." And he invited me to write an official response that would get linked to the paper in pubmed. I don't have time for that nonsense.

In another case, I contacted the authors of a paper to ask about their results and why they did something the way they did, and they wrote back and said, "I really can't remember- we did that work in 2005."  Seriously! More than once have authors written back to me to say they did the work 4-5 years ago and don't recall why they didn't use this or that control or why they didn't look at 260/230 readings, etc.

So then the question is, why doesn't a reviewer go "this paper is missing critical experiments to support their conclusions or is missing information that would allow someone else to repeat the experiment" if I do? Does anyone even read it? Could there be a lot of "old boys club" mentality going on and you need to have friends in the right places (editorial boards) to get your papers through without question? Maybe.

These journals that publish unedited rubbish? It reflects in their citation index scores.

You could use their paper for your next journal club to demonstrate to other students how not to write a paper.

I still don't understand the ridiculous point you're trying to make.  So what if they did the control for two experiments 7 years ago.  That doesn't make it OK to reuse the data lanes in another paper.  Don't be lazy and either re-run the gel (which is ethically not advised) or redo the knockdown (because this is science and replicates are GOOD) and check your results again.